Woman May Have Scored Renoir Painting For $60 In Lucky Flea Market Find

There’s always that hope among flea market shoppers and garage sale pickers — maybe I’ll get a really lucky score today and uncover something priceless no one else has noticed. Most of the time that feeling peters out when walking away with a gently used coffee maker, but one woman reportedly scored a painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir for a paltry $60 at a flea market.

The painting was part of a box of this and that purchased by the woman, and is scheduled to be auctioned off later this month by a fine arts and antiques auction gallery in Virginia, reports ABC News. “Paysage Bords de Seine” is estimated to go for between $75,000 and $100,000.

It wasn’t even the Renoir the buyer had ogled — it was far less classy fare that caught her fancy.

“What had actually caught her eye in the box wasn’t the valuable Renoir but a plastic cow and a Paul Bunyan doll. She stored the rest of the box’s contents first in a white plastic bag in a shed, later in her car’s trunk and eventually in her kitchen,” the auction company’s fine arts specialist said.

Even after the painting caught her attention, it was really the frame that she wanted and began taking the whole thing apart. Before she could toss the painting her mom suggested she take a closer look, you know, just in case. That “just in case” moment turned out to be worth it, when she spotted the name “Renoir” on the painting and took it in to have it authenticated.

There are records chronicling where the painting came from, but its last known owner was in Paris in 1926. However it ended up at a Virginia flea market is a mystery tailor-made for Antiques Roadshow.

And that neither the seller nor the buyer apparently read the nameplate mounted on the frame! I can understand not recognizing the name but for gosh sakes, google/Wikipedia it. The linked story mentions the nameplate, and sure enough it is a gilt plate on what looks to be an original gilded frame. (So yes it was a lot more prominent than just a possibly indecipherable signature on the canvas.)

A lot of times, art becomes more important and valuable later because enough time has passed to where the art community can examine the historical context for the work. It’s like other kinds of history. It’s hard to fully appreciate the historical significance of something until you’re many decades away and are able to look back at the time before the event or work and the effect that event or work had on the world or community.

It is all based on what someone is willing to pay.
All it takes is some rich or famous person to spend big bucks on an artist’s painting and then everyone else will spend big bucks on the artists other paintings.

As TheMansfieldMauler said it helps when the person is dead as they cant make anything new so there are less of their paintings to go around.

Not with that frame and provenance. Turn-of-the-century salons (art shows) in Paris were known for cramming art in floor to rather high ceilings, all in ridiculously showy gold frames. This is a piece he sent to salon. Also, the intent of impressionism was to be the opposite of the established “Old Master” style studios. You could say they were out to troll the art establishment who thought everything should be perfectly posed, roughed out repeatedly, studied, polished and painted for MONTHS sometimes YEARS.

“What had actually caught her eye in the box wasn’t the valuable Renoir but a plastic cow and a Paul Bunyan doll. She stored the rest of the box’s contents first in a white plastic bag in a shed, later in her car’s trunk and eventually in her kitchen,” the auction company’s fine arts specialist said.

Actually there’s a link somewhere to the art appraiser’s website, so yeah I believe the gist of the story. The exception is that I read somewhere else the same story with her paying $7 dollars for the box of stuff, but whatever the small amount was, nothing compared to the score and finding a valuable piece of art history.